NEW YORK CITY'S HOMELESS POPULATION

New York City's Homeless Population

New York City's Homeless Population

Homelessness in America first appeared in the early 1600s with the beginning of Immigration, which mainly consisted of poor people looking for a job and a place to settle. Between 1870 and 1924 millions of immigrants were coming to U.S. and cramming tenement houses. Those of them who were extremely poor and could not afford their living expenses, finally found themselves on the streets. The Great Depression of the 1930s, which brought unstableness and massive unemployment, increased homeless population drastically. (Phelan, Bruce, 1999)

The history of homelessness in New York City can be traced back to the late 1970s. At that time there was sufficient housing in New York for those people with law incomes. In the mid-1970s, however, New York City began to experience serious economic problems and came very close to declaring bankruptcy. This was symbolized by the famous newspaper headline: "Ford to city: Drop Dead." "...in the late 1970s early signs of a growing affordable housing shortage could be seen in the rapidly growing number of homeless men and women sleeping on the streets, in parks, and in transportation terminals" . (Phelan, Bruce, 1999) This was made worse by the fuel crisis a few years later, as well as a national recession in the early 1980s, and resulted in very high costs for building owners. To try to keep the middle class, New York City created a real estate tax abatement program known as J-51 program, which converted thousands of rental units into co-operative apartments. Unfortunately, many of these converted units were single-room-occupancy (SRO) hotels in different boroughs of the city that were used by law-income citizens. Many of the SRO buildings were destroyed or converted into condominiums. "Between 1972 and 1982, largely through this conversion process, New York City saw the loss of 100,000 SRO units”. The SRO tenants, who were people living on fixed incomes, social security or public assistance, became part of homeless population. (Phelan, Bruce, 1999)

At the same time, many building owners in New York were abandoning their buildings or even setting fire to them for the insurance money because they were too expensive to operate. This also reduced the amount of law-income housing in New York. In addition, when President Reagan came into office in the 1980s, the situation has gotten worse. He began to cut federal funds not only from law-income programs such as Medicaid, food stamps and welfare programs, but also from law-income housing program such as Section 8 Rent Subsidy Program, which had long provided rent subsidies for law- income housing. "When the federal government withdrew from Section 8 program, private developers walked away from law-income housing". (Phelan, Bruce, 1999)As if all that was not bad enough, it was around this time that New York State began to release thousands of patients from mental hospitals. However, there were insufficient treatment cervices for these patients and many began to live on the streets of the ...